Joking apart

If you say you can’t go to bed, the doctor says “Boo! Let somebody else do the work. What are your servants for?” You try to explain that you can’t leave a baby with a cook. He replies that it won’t hurt your husband to have a cold dinner for once. You explain with infinite patience, slowly and as grammatically as possible, that it is not a question of dinner, but that cook doesn’t understand what baby wants. Then the doctor crams on his hat and says that inexperienced people make the best nurses, and will you be in bed, please, in half an hour from now, and don’t get up until he sees you again the day after to-morrow.

At first it is rather nice, having a fire lit in your bedroom, ordering tea to be brought up, beginning a new novel, drawing the blinds, and lighting a little silver lamp. Cook says that she can manage Master Tommy splendidly until nurse comes back. It is a pity Maggie has to count the laundry to-day, but it can’t be helped.

The bed is soft and warm; the hot-bottle is almost as good as a visit to the Riviera; you turn the pages of your novel.

A piercing shriek rends the air—and another—and another—hot and damp with terror, your heart galloping like a fire engine, you are in the nursery—no time for a dressing-gown. It is impossible to say which is making the most noise, the baby or the cook. “Yeow, yeow, yeow, yeow,—hush, hush—yeow, yeow, yeow—there, there, there: there’s a pretty boy—upsy-daisy! peek-a-boo! yeow, yeow——” “Exactly what I told that vile doctor would happen,” you mutter, stopping your ears. “Don’t rock him like that!” you bawl. “Beg pardon, m’m?” inquires cook, with a smile and cocking one ear at you while the baby’s head swings now to the lamp above his head, now down to the ground, missing the coal-scuttle by a hair’s breadth. “Beg pardon, m’m? I’m sorry he’s disturbed you. Upsy-daisy! We’ve been getting on capitally.”

Struggling between politeness and gratitude, fear of offending the cook (it is the great dread that hangs over us all), and the murderous instinct of the parent whose young has been annoyed, you take your offspring on your knee and offer him your humble apologies, while cook runs off “just a moment to see to the kettle.”

Ten minutes elapse. You are getting very cold in your little cambric nightgown. The baby is inclined to be exacting, like one who brings a petition for heavy damages for a small injury. He is rather jumpy in the nerves, and inclined to be suspicious and contradictory.

“Why don’t you want me to break that cup?” is the kind of question that he asks, “Why don’t you? Why”—increasing to a wail—“why don’t you? Will you tell me why you don’t want that cup broken——” “Oh hang!” you say, “because I don’t. What on earth is cook doing?” You are hot now instead of cold. “Do play with your soldiers, Tommy.” “Why do you look like that?” says Tommy, beginning to cry. “What’s that on your cheek?” he demands suddenly, fingering your pet mole with a sticky finger. It is now twenty minutes since cook left the room. You ring the bell violently.

“Why do you ring the bell?” asks Tommy, now weeping unrestrainedly. “I don’t want you to ring the bell—I want my tea—I want Nanny—I don’t want medicine—I don’t want you to ring the bell—my tooth is sore—I want Nanny——”

Cook comes rushing up. “Sorry to have kept you, m’m,” she says, “but I had to chop a few sticks for the kettle; the fire had gone that low. Now, master, come to me and we’ll ride-a-cock-horse.”

There is nothing for it. Tommy’s interest is on one side, a long life of seclusion in the asylum on the other. Tommy must go to the wall.

“I think I wouldn’t move him about, Jane,” you say. “If you will read to him and give him his tea he will be quite happy.” Then you escape with a heart of lead and ears of granite, and lay you down once more. You get hot and cold alternately as occasional faint screams reach you from the nursery. The coals fall, one by one, lower in the grate. The fire is nearly out. You see the cold, grey trees waving outside the window. The hot-bottle got chilled while you were in the nursery. The only warm thing in the room is your pillow which is boiling——

Pop-op-op-op-bang!

That is how Maggie always announces her presence. She staggers into the cold twilight, bearing an immense tray with tea sufficient for a school feast, and all the other items on her long menu are stale and tasteless. The butter is so shivering with cold that it is only able to clutch a few crumbs out of the bread, and these lie petrified on its chilly flakes. The sandwiches are too small, dry besides, and the jam inside them is an old enemy. The cake is last week’s: one of Jane’s failures, which, as she says, “seems to hang on a long time.” Maggie sweeps your book, your lamp, and everything you are likely to want off the table, and plants her horrid collection of uneatables in their place, lights a flaring gas immediately in front of your eyes and prepares to depart. “Maggie,” you say (how hatefully irksome it is to ask for the obvious when one is ill), “would you please draw the blinds, and make up the fire, and put out that gas, and bring me back my lamp and books.”

Oh, why did you ever let her go near the grate? It would have been chilly work making up the fire yourself, but next time—a thousand times Yes.

Banger, banger, banger, racker, racker, racker, PONG! racker, racker, racker, rack, rack, rack, PONG! PONG!! PONG!!! Your spinal cord splits in sympathy with the brave lump of coal which has held out so long against Maggie’s invincible poker, and which now retreats in a million fragments to the other end of the room. Shovel, ovel, ovel, ovel—shovel, ovel, ov—— “Surely that is enough, Maggie; you will make it so black,” you venture at last.

Down come the blinds with a sickening rattle, and you are left to take what comfort you can from the cold, strong tea (she has forgotten the hot water and the bell is at the other end of the room), the shivering butter, and the stern, unpopular cake. These sit on like unwelcome guests, hour after hour. There is no room for anything else on the table, and there they remain; that horrible cake staring into the fire, just like the kind of person who sits on and on after tea, and breaks your marked silence by asking, “Have you heard anything from Annie lately?” and futilities of that sort. The butter, perhaps, is prepared to leave, and says, “Well, we ought to be getting home, I suppose; we’ve paid you quite a visitation.” But the cake takes no notice whatever, and the sandwiches stand about on the tray, fingering things and asking, “That’s new, isn’t it? Who gave it you?” and so on. If Maggie had had the intuition of a louse she would have announced their cab—I mean she would have carried them away—ages and ages ago.

It is impossible to read with the cake looking like that. You doze—a feverish, thirsty doze. Dinner will have to be very tactfully presented. You wonder whether Jane will have thought of sweetbread or what. The bed is very crumby. Can that odious cake having been leaning over us to see whether we were asleep, whispering, perhaps, “Well, good-bye then, I won’t disturb you?” Probably the sandwiches giggled and said, “Don’t get up, we can let ourselves out.” The sandwiches’ names are Catherine and Agnes, and one is thirty-seven and the other thirty-one; both are unmarried and very fond of us.

Hang the cake! Why couldn’t it go when it saw we were asleep, without spilling those wretched crumbs. One is just in the small of our back and another is under our left leg. How hot the bed is!

Pop-op-op-bang! Crash!

The door-handle all but went through the looking-glass that time. Maggie pushes the door gently after her with her leg as she comes in.

“Shall I put it on the bed, m’m?”

You start up in a fright. The cake has not gone after all; it is still there, looking very hard and seedy and disapproving. And there are those silly sandwiches looking with disdain on the new tray with the new batch of arrivals. But their disdain is nothing to your disgust. Sweetbread, did you say? “It’s stewed steak, m’m,” says Maggie, “won’t you have any?”

Stewed steak! Grey, heavy, steaming, thick, nutritious, and garnished with two potatoes, very blue about the lips, and an ample supply of cabbage! “Take it away at once, please,” you say in trembling tones, “and that horrible tea too. I don’t want anything,” you add, deeply injured.

“There’s roly-poly pudding, m’m, and macaroni cheese,” says Maggie; “will you have both?”

You are very hot by the time she quite understands. The crumbs in the bed are like living coals, and Maggie was in such a hurry to get away that she did not notice the fire. You get up and remake the bed, fetch hot water, wash, and return to bed shivering. Then a kind and anxious husband, with a peculiarly pungent cigar, comes up and reports that the macaroni cheese is excellent, won’t you have some?

You drop into a sound sleep at about ten, which is the hour Maggie selects to “do” the washstand and tidy the room. If any one has not the experience or the imagination to supply details of the subdued clatter of soap-dishes and glasses, varied by heavy falls of coal and hair-brushes, or of the piercing squeak of each drawer as it opens and shuts, neither will they realize the significance of a basin-cloth left on the floor just where it catches the eye. At about eleven you probably rise, seize its clammy edge between your finger and thumb, and fling it into the passage. After this you return to the cold bottle and the hot crumbs that were not all brushed out when you remade the bed.

Morning dawns brightly with the prospect of a pleasant day of peace and leisure. You make your own bed, and perform an elaborate toilet between early tea and breakfast, so that by eight o’clock you are sitting up, good and happy, waiting for a lightly boiled egg. At eight-fifteen an agitated husband enters, looking at his watch, and says he will just go down and hurry them up. Punctuality is your especial fad, and unpunctuality is Maggie’s, so by eight-thirty you are already warm with the heat of battle. You rehearse your displeasure beforehand. Biting sarcasms, haunting home truths, pungent, pathetic appeals to humanity and reason are prepared by your active brain, already aglow with the necessity for being “after” every dratted person in the house if any hanged thing is to get done.

At half-past eight the door is flung open with the inevitable crash, and reason and eloquence give place to the stronger spirits of fear and gratitude. You mentally apologize to Maggie for all the things you were going to say. Your heart is wrung when you see her staggering under a load of silver jugs and entrée dishes, two loaves, a ham, and five plates with knives and forks to match.

“I am sorry the master was obliged to complain about breakfast being late, m’m,” says Maggie, looking like a thunderstorm with heart disease. She disposes the feast all over your room, plates on the top of your clothes, two entrée dishes at your feet (just where you can’t reach them without spilling the tea), and the ham on the washstand. “I had to get the extra dishes out of the plate chest,” pursues Maggie reproachfully, “and they were all to polish before I could take them down to the kitchen.”

To explain just then the ideal breakfast in bed would involve “suiting yourself” in a month, or, more probably, recantation, explanations, tears, emotions, and all sorts of luxuries in which you are unwilling to indulge Maggie at the moment, so you decide to wait for more settled weather. At ten o’clock the entrée dishes are still weighing heavily on your toes, you have heard tradesmen’s boys come and go (repeated falls of plaster from the ceiling and sudden shocks to your frame have betrayed their several applications to the bell), but cook has had no orders and it is certain that she will not act without them. This means that nothing will arrive in time for anything throughout the day, and the master will consult his watch, and your temperature will rise from nervous apprehension before every meal. Also, you would like your room tidied. Where have all those miserable women gone? They seem to disappear like worms into the sand and all is silent as the grave. You tumble out of bed again and go to the bell. If the tradesmen’s boys can raise the dead and restore the deaf to hearing, shall our efforts not be equally blessed? At last you get hold of the cook. She had not come up for fear of disturbing you. She has no ideas at all about food. “Would you fancy some stewed steak for lunch? There doesn’t seem to be much else to have, without you have the hot-pot—oh yes, of course there is the fish if you care for that; would it be substantial enough for the master? Oh, beg pardon, she understood for lunch and dinner both—quite so. Would master fancy roly-poly pudding and macaroni cheese? Yes, he had them last night, but she thought he liked them better than anything else—and there didn’t seem to be much else at this time of year, without you went to the expense of fruit——”

“Now I suppose,” you reflect afterwards, “that that ass of a doctor would say, why don’t I order what I like for myself. Could Cleopatra have had the energy to order anything but an asp for herself after she had ‘seen about’ the figs for the rest of the household?”

Clara has now been up and dusted under the bed. Does any happy, hearty, healthy person know what this means? If not, let him take the next time when he is tired and in a temper, and let him lie on two chairs and get a child to joggle all the legs of them in turn.

You doze.

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

“If you please’m, Mrs. Jameson has rung up to say, could you lunch with her to-day at one-thirty?”

“I suppose you didn’t think of telling her I was in bed?” you suggest.

“No, m’m, I thought you might wish to speak to her yourself.”

You doze.

Pop——pop (very gently). Jane enters.

“Please’m, did you telephone for the fish?”

Any amateur can supply the answer to this question.

You sleep.

Pop-op-op-op-BANG!

You were so sound asleep that you could only catch the concluding words of Maggie’s sentence: “... and she thought, m’m, perhaps you’d like to look at the pipe where it’s burst.”

(A few minutes later) “... nor you don’t wish to see the man?”

“I think not, thank you. I could draw him with my eyes shut.”

“Would you wish me to telephone or will you?”

“!!!!—and while you are about it, Maggie, you might bring some coal.”

She brings it in three-quarters of an hour, when you have got nicely off to sleep again, and before a fresh piece of coal can be put on the fire the grate has to be raked completely to pieces and resolved into its original elements of several bars and some other pieces of very resonant iron.

Naturally lunch was late. You knew it would be, and Jane was very sorry but she had forgotten to order the cream. After lunch there was an awful row with the baby. He was left alone while nurse went down to get some drinking water, and he fell off his chair—there has to be some one always on the spot with children. You can’t turn your back a minute, etc.

Probably the doctor called at tea-time and asked why you were up, and it is improbable in the extreme that he took in one word of your lucid explanation of the facts. He would tell you, if you asked him, that women make difficulties, and that he himself once had a week in bed and that everything went on just as usual. But then doctors don’t mind the room not being “done,” and their daily work doesn’t behave like a sucking-kid after its mother. It stays where it is until its master comes to fetch it, and if it isn’t done, well then, it just isn’t, and that’s all about it.